Each region is different and policy making should reflect that

You will not find anybody that loves “the regions” more than me. The North East, simply the greatest region there ever has been and ever will be. The North West, love what is going on here. And London, for some reason never part of the discussions of regions or referred to as part of the “Greater South East” is the economic pump upon which our whole nation drinks.

There is nothing that would fill me with greater joy than an economy where you never have to leave Darlington to get a great paying job, where you can equally and happily pursue a PhD in Clyde, Colchester or Cambridge, and where the hills and valleys of Yorkshire, Humberside, and Staffordshire, are pockmarked with the blistering festoons of new laboratories, cyclotrons, and data centres.

High flying blind

Now, to be fair to the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee they clearly find regional inequalities as egregious as I do. Their new report Flying Blind: Innovation, Growth and the Regions makes the compelling case that regional inequalities in research spending is a brake on economic growth. Their central idea is that if more public investment flowed to the places outside of the South East more private investment would follow which would encourage greater clusterisation and in turn spin-up that wonderful fly-wheel of increased prosperity.

Their policy proposals are a mixture of better measurements for regional investments, national programmes ranging from regional frameworks to graduate retention schemes, greater support for spin-outs and technology transfer offices, and more involvement for mayors in devolved policy making.

The problem is that in articulating that the government’s policy might not work if they just do a grab-bag of things which feel a bit regionally focussed (i.e. not in London) the committee alight on a grab-bag of solutions which are sound in their own right but cumulatively would be equally disparate and potentially unhelpful.

Pouring petrol on a fire

The central premise of the report is that

Simply pouring more money into the existing ecosystem is not enough, and decision-makers in London cannot afford to be complacent. The Government should take a data-driven approach and comprehensively monitor, map and support the growth of innovation-led clusters across the regions. At present, the UK is flying blind when it comes to public and private R&D spending. It is unacceptable that our major R&D funders cannot properly measure and map levels of investment, their outputs, and regional impacts.

It is too great an exaggeration to say that the UK is flying blind. BRES data provides a retrospective look at spending on a regional basis (it is not a perfect survey) and UKRI provides a breakdown on regional spend. Even then, assuming data could be made live, or at least more timely and detailed, it’s not entirely clear what should be done with this new information.

The committee set out that London has a kind of treble advantage when it comes to research spending. It has a history of research spending which begets more research spending. It has access to the best infrastructure and a large population. And there is a tendency for decision makers in London to invest in London by “default.” It is at least therefore implicit, if not explicitly said, that in a world of fixed budgets more spending outside of London would mean less spending inside of London.

Hello, are you from the greater South East?

Instead of tensioning some of the trade-offs the committee has alighted on three recommendations simultaneously. One is to make the greater South East share a bit more. The committees suggest this could be done by encouraging geographic diffusion through asking the government to set out a strategy for spillovers from the Oxford-to-Cambridge Growth corridor. Asking the government to “publish an assessment of whether funding to Golden Triangle institutions should be made contingent on projects having a quantifiable economic impact elsewhere.” And, in a classic of the genre, appoint a minister to champion innovation in each region.

Simultaneously, the committee also wants to see a regional cluster framework that is attuned to the distinct competitive advantages of each place, a Northern Gritstone or Midlands Mindforge established in every region, and a regional graduate retention strategy. Making the South East reach out more and not-the-South-East more prosperous is not bad on its own terms. The third is then a mixture of funding and support for spin-outs, scale-ups and regional infrastructure, allied to national plans. All of these measures come wrapped with the comforting idea that the government has the capacity to radically improve data on investor availability, regional spending, and the economic potential of clusters.

The recommendations aren’t bad on their own, some of them like funding the transformation of technology transfer offices are overdue and welcome (and well discussed), the problem is in trying to fix a system wide problem the report moves component parts that wouldn’t fix the system overall.

It is unlikely that the government has the capacity or ability to bring some of these ideas into existence. Northern Gritstone is an excellent model of using place-based research assets along with private capital to drive research investment. It also partners with four institutions across four devolved mayoral combined authority. It covers a significant part of the North and one of its key benefits is that it’s both regionally and inter-regionally focussed. This model is enormously successful but this does not mean it would be the optimal model in Greater Brighton, or the West of England, or the Tees Valley.

And this is the central challenge facing devolved research policy making. In this context, the regions make little sense as a term, as being not London is not a useful way to categorise the majority of the country.

Please, won’t somebody think of the trade-offs

If the committee believes funding should be rebalanced then it should also be up front about the trade-offs in doing so. The choice is, on a small island, to redistribute funding directly, invest in greater connectivity between assets, or add regional qualifiers to existing funding pots. The debate isn’t that there are regional imbalances in funding but there is no consensus on what trade-offs should be made, the mechanism for rebalancing, or the criteria for the receipt of cash.

It is also entirely reasonable to believe that places outside of the greater South East should have greater support in a devolved context. The report has a mix of policies that sound regionally focussed but aren’t in reality, graduates will largely move to where they can find work and, as the report points out, their retention is actually more about infrastructure, housing, and transport. Simultaneously, the report is entirely correct that infrastructure is a major barrier to growth but the infrastructure need is different across the UK, and one of the largest challenges is in a world of reduced capital spending finding the greatest impact.

It is one of the single greatest injustices of our time that where you are born has a profound impact on the opportunities of your life. It could not be more obvious that infrastructure investment has been imbalanced, that lack of public investment has hampered otherwise potentially strong economies, and the entire country could be more prosperous if deliberate attempts were made to target investment in some of the most promising but underfunded assets.

The challenge, and at the heart of devolved policy making, is the careful unwinding of where government can have the most impact, what should be decided locally, and the trade-offs that should be made to make the whole research ecosystem stronger. Without this analysis there is less a view on the future than a wish-list on how things could be better.